ABSTRACT
The paucity of good novels amongst our recent fictions, and the merits of this writer’s former production, made us turn with interest to his new work. That interest has been disappointed. Basil is a piece of romantic sensibility,—challenging success by its constant appeal to emotion, and by the rapid vehemence of its highly wrought rhetoric. We had hoped that the author would in his second publication have become more reflective,—and that he would have studied literary art in another school than that to which we fear he has irrevocably devoted himself. Amidst our praise of Antonina, we warned him against the exaggeration of the French school and ‘its accumulated horrors.’ [See p. 41 above.] He has prefaced his present work with an explanation of his views of Art in fiction, occupying a score of pages; and we must say that its crude criticism is practically refuted even by his own story.
